Hope Hotel Phantom
dir. BOJAN STOJCIC
DUTCH PREMIERE
In November of 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement was negotiated at the Hope Hotel in Dayton, Ohio. 27 years later, an artist from Bosnia flew to the United States and booked a room at the same hotel.
In 1995, a hotel near a small city in Ohio accommodated those negotiating the agreement that would end the violent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 27 years later, at a time when the Dayton Agreement is associated more with dysfunction than with peace, the filmmaker books a room in that same hotel as the people who left his country in an unchangeable quasi-democratic state. In which its citizens can only be recognized as one of three ethnic categories, rendering everyone else as “others” – citizens without the right of political participation or recognition. The director occupied the same spaces as those who had once shaped his past and future – a phantom in the echoes of this historical event: a dream turned nightmare.
SHOWTIMES | Special Feature: New Talents Competition 1 with Avitaminosis, Big Phat Party, The Trip & Until All Is Resolved
– Special Guests: directors Rimantas Oičenka, Bojan Stojcic, Kateryna Ruzhyna, Marija Georgiev
Saturday, 25 November – 11:30
Sunday, 26 November – 14:15
HOPE HOTEL PHANTOM | 2023 | 22 min | Bosnia and Herzegovina, United States of America
| PRODUCTION | Bojan Stojcic |
| SCREENPLAY | Bojan Stojcic |
| CINEMATOGRAPHY | Bojan Stojcic |
| EDITING | Bojan Stojcic, Midhat Mujkic |
| LANGUAGE | English |
| SUBTITLES | English |
FESTIVALS & AWARDS (selection):
ZagrebDox, 2023 – Premiere | Sarajevo Film Festival, 2023
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
My role as a visual artist has always been to address the implications Bosnia and Herzegovina has on the dominant Western narrative in the Balkans, and as such subverting the masculine geopolitical power relations rooted in the gaze towards the peripheral. My practice is informed by my own lived experience of the war, but my artistic position is not rooted in the exploitation of this identity, as I firmly believe such practice also contributes to further peripheralization of subjects such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and myself within it.
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Bojan Stojčić (1988) is a visual artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. With his multimedia works, Stojcic addresses the autocolonial discourse and affect in the meta-Yugoslav space, questioning the collective and individual view of the peripheral Other and self. Shaped by intense experiences of loss, absence, displacement and transition, both in public and in his private life, Stojcic positioned himself as a European peripheral entity, winning this position and subverting it. Expressing himself through humour, poetics and geopolitics, Stojcic explores the traces and transformations of the present. He lives in Sarajevo where he runs his design and art studio.